Fragmenta – A Golang CMS | Hacker News Reader

Fragmenta – A Golang CMS

fragmenta.eu

100 pointsgbugniot17 comments

The landing page seems to be a little confused about what it's advertising. To me this should either be targeting people who need a CMS or people who want to use Golang.

If I'm just a guy who needs a CMS, then I really want to know what this offers as a CMS vs any other solution. I don't think it would really matter to me whether this was written in Golang or PHP or Python since I'd want to use the system to manage my content, not be writing code for it.

The tagline "build websites with Go" is even a bit scary because it makes it sound like rather than being a CMS, this is something where I need to know how to program in order to use it.

But everything else on the page is very dev-oriented... but in that case, as a dev, I'd really rather have the install, capabilities, requirements, etc. up front in a clean table rather than the CMS GUI demo.

Maybe I'm alone in feeling this way, though. :)

One nice property of Go programs is that they tend to be lightweight and statically compiled, which makes installation a breeze compared to PHO/Ruby/Python/etc. Also, you don't need to be as concerned about performance, albeit that isn't probably particularly exciting for CMS-things which tend to bottleneck on the DB/ORM.

To your point, they could just advertise the advantages instead of using "Go" as a proxy term, but it does draw me in a bit more since I'm already familiar with Go.

The landing page is clearly not the one of a mature product. There is next to no documentation whatsoever about how it is supposed to work, and don't even try to get started with it if you don't know how to program with Go, nor have installed Go on your machine.

> The tagline "build websites with Go" is even a bit scary because it makes it sound like rather than being a CMS, this is something where I need to know how to program in order to use it.

This isn't a CMS for non developers, obviously. This isn't Wordpress.

If you are not a developer and don't need advanced features like a comment system, you'd be better of with a tool like "Hugo" which generates static HTML files from manifests that you can then upload on any cheap host via SFTP. It's more secure and performs better than a solution running its own server.

The middleground is a difficult balance; being simple enough for 'normal' users but allowing power users to take advantage of version control and working with plain text.

I attempted to build something that fits the bill by building a self-hosted Git powered CMS that publishes with Hugo.

https://www.graphia.co.uk

> This isn't a CMS for non developers, obviously. This isn't Wordpress.

That could be emphasized. "Set of libraries by which devs can quickly create robust and performant CMS providing a UI that content editors love to use."

I really don’t see the value proposition in Hugo anymore and I’ve used it and am still am.

I’m about to move my site over to Wordpress and deploy it using one of the static site generators. With ACF everything is so easy and quick.

Which static site generators are you considering?

There’s a plugin for Wordpress called simple static site generator. I’ve had good results with it.

You're not alone, this isn't a CMS anymore than Django is, and Django could fall under that role if it's considered a "Developer CMS" but those are just Web Frameworks. This is more accurately a Web Framework. IMHO a CMS is something an end-user can setup, a Web Framework is a software library for developers that gives you some batteries (not always all, but sometimes: sure!) see CppCMS[0] as an example of a project that went the route of claiming the 'CMS' title the idea was similar to this projects I suppose "Write your own CMS"[1] but it's much more accurate to call it a Web Framework.

[0]: http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main

[1]: http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/faq#If.CppCMS.is.not.a.CMS.....

It's amazing that in 2018 we keep building new CMSs. Human curiosity is without limits. I'm genuinely amazed about this. And seeing a CMS built with Go is refreshing.

I have to say though, the "What doesn't it do?" section seems like an extension of the "What does it do?" section. A "What doesn't it do?" should list what the CMS actually doesn't do instead of listing things nobody wants anyway. Who wants "hundreds of complicated back-end screens"? No-one. So no need to say that the CMS doesn't do that.

My favorite CMS at the moment is Contentful. It's hosted, self-managed and headless. I have no idea what language it's written in and I don't care.

Latest commit on the Github is from Aug 2017, doesn't seem that well maintained.

Question: Does this mean there are finally good i18n and l10n packages in Go?

My first glance looks seems to suggest no, but I want to be wrong.

What do you think about this https://github.com/go-playground/universal-translator ? I am planning to use this as the core component to provide i18n for sites hosted on daptin cms.

That looks... adequate :) Which is probably good enough for now.

This is where I hope some package is really good and makes it into core.

Site seems to be down, cached mirror from Google: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3feSvC...

I like the 'styled editing' - not seen that before. Is that difficult to achieve?

Agree with the other points on the focus on Go vs functionality.

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